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I tried to extend Komodo IDE back when I used it heavily. I had no knowledge of Firefox internals then. The biggest problem I had with this was the lack of doc

I tried to extend Komodo IDE back when I used it heavily. I had no knowledge of Firefox internals then. The biggest problem I had with this was the lack of documentation and a sane development environment. Working in an embedded environment makes debugging (and exploratory programming) much harder: you can't just `print` your way through APIs and things. You can't use `pdb`, much less graphical debuggers. This makes developing such extensions painful: you need to learn a whole lot of APIs at once and memorize them before writing even one line of code. Emacs is better on both accounts. The "self-documenting" part means that there are rich docstrings for every single function you'd want to invoke and that you have many supporting tools for discovering APIs (like apropos). There's a Messages buffer which functions as a stdout, where you can dump whatever you need to see at any point. You can also immediately see the source of any function, even if it's implemented in C. And you have a graphical debugger for Elisp if you need it. Emacs is a really nice development platform for Elisp and accidentally for other languages. Things like Komodo are great for normal development, but much harder to develop for. That's my impression, anyway.

hollerith 12y ago
That is helpful, thanks, but I cannot guess what you mean by "working in an embedded environment".
- klibertp 12y ago
  I mean "embedded" as in a "scripting environment hosted by a bigger app" (nothing to do with embedded systems in hardware sense, obviously). I thought the term is widely used for this, for example there's a guide to "embedding python"[1] and they use the same term in Lua[2]. For me, such an environment is defined - in practical terms - by the lack of some features you expect from "general" programming environment. No stdout/stdin, no fork, no exec, no file and file system access, no threads, no sockets - and if you get some of this it's via an embedding app, not standard means. It's hard to work in such an environment because it's very rare for app developers to provide you with all the standard tools you have when developing standalone program. One of the most painful experiences I had with such env was with Google Refine - now Open Refine - which allowed scripting in Python (via Jython) and Clojure, but only really supported executing single statements in a tiny textbox, without any real error reporting and without access to anything external (like to files). It was a nightmare, and it's generally how this looks like: MS Office, Web browsers, Emacs are the exceptions here, definitely not the norm. [1] https://docs.python.org/2/extending/embedding.html https://docs.python.org/2/extending/embedding.html [2] http://www.lua.org/pil/24.html http://www.lua.org/pil/24.html

hollerith 12y ago

That is helpful, thanks, but I cannot guess what you mean by "working in an embedded environment".

klibertp 12y ago
I mean "embedded" as in a "scripting environment hosted by a bigger app" (nothing to do with embedded systems in hardware sense, obviously). I thought the term is widely used for this, for example there's a guide to "embedding python"[1] and they use the same term in Lua[2]. For me, such an environment is defined - in practical terms - by the lack of some features you expect from "general" programming environment. No stdout/stdin, no fork, no exec, no file and file system access, no threads, no sockets - and if you get some of this it's via an embedding app, not standard means. It's hard to work in such an environment because it's very rare for app developers to provide you with all the standard tools you have when developing standalone program. One of the most painful experiences I had with such env was with Google Refine - now Open Refine - which allowed scripting in Python (via Jython) and Clojure, but only really supported executing single statements in a tiny textbox, without any real error reporting and without access to anything external (like to files). It was a nightmare, and it's generally how this looks like: MS Office, Web browsers, Emacs are the exceptions here, definitely not the norm. [1] https://docs.python.org/2/extending/embedding.html https://docs.python.org/2/extending/embedding.html [2] http://www.lua.org/pil/24.html http://www.lua.org/pil/24.html